| MATIAS ROMERO, OAXACA
- A brightly painted tour bus lumbered up the fake cobbling of the
Barcelo Resort's curved driveway. The resort is one of the oldest
of the four- and five-star hotels that curl around Tangolunda Bay
on Oaxaca's Pacific coast. The bus spit out old, young, slim, plump,
and in-between women and men, nearly all sunburned, between puffs
of refrigerated air.
Some stepped off the bus and staggered nearly to a halt, as if
the slicing heat had momentarily paralyzed them. Most did not seem
any happier than if they had just stepped off a city bus after a
long day at work, even though they each were paying $135 a day for
all the sun, seafood, satellite TV, mixed drinks, tropical sunsets,
nightclub music, air conditioning and breakfast buffets they could
consume. In front of the bus, a group of young men in bright white
shirts jumped from a bright white truck and hurried large maps of
the Bays of Huatulco tourist resort through the hotel lobby and
into a large conference room. Inside that room, rows of shiny new
chairs were lined up regiment-precise on the green leaves and maroon
daffodils of the carpeting. Slowly, Huatulco residents, tourism
industry workers and business owners - some in suits and ties, others
in shorts and suntans - filled the chairs.
Congressional representative Jaime Larrabal, a member of the Tourism
Committee, convened the meeting on November 10, 2000 to report on
Huatulco's growth (or the lack of it). On stage, the forces that
control the Bays of Huatulco faced the audience. At least fifteen
representatives of municipal, state and federal government agencies,
private industries and local communities sat and stared solemnly.
Jorge Sanchez, mayor of Santa Maria Huatulco, the municipality where
the Huatulco resort is located, spoke first. He began by mentioning
one of his biggest worries: "the huge numbers of young people going
to the United States." Later, though, he boiled down Huatulco's
problems to just three: the stalled construction on the new superhighway
from Oaxaca City, the need for cheaper flights from Mexico City
and continued conflict over who owns what land. (This is how the
ongoing land war in Huatulco is usually discussed: tacked on to
the end of a list of tourism infrastructure concerns.)
Sanchez touched on two key points that were tied together later
in the meeting, when another speaker pointed out that foreign remittances
are about to overtake tourism as the second largest source of foreign
currency in Mexico. In spite of the wild popularity of places like
Cancun, and the fact that Mexico is the eighth biggest tourist destination
in the world, the millions of undocumented Mexican workers in the
United States seem to have hit on a more successful strategy for
securing foreign currency.1
"A white elephant." That is how an architectural commission representative
described the entire Bays of Huatulco development to the hundreds
assembled in the Barcelo conference room. Local FONATUR (National
Fund to Promote Tourism) Director Jorge Ayanegui - perhaps unintentionally
- affirmed that assertion when he reported that not a single lot
was sold for hotel construction in 2000.
Another FONATUR representative noted that there are 700 million
tourists in the world and Huatulco should be attracting more of
them. The Mexican government started FONATUR, part of the Department
of Tourism, to increase Mexico's income from foreign visitors. The
agency manages six coastal resorts, including the famed Cancun.
The land for Huatulco, FONATUR's most recent development, was expropriated
from its original residents in 1984.
Such elusive creatures, those tourists. Who are they? Generally,
anyone lives in a wintry climate and earns discretionary income.
Specifically, anyone who migrates south during "American season"
- that cold-weather stretch from Thanksgiving to Easter - to the
warm-water beaches scattered from the Pacific isles to the Caribbean.
The job of the battalion on Barcelo stage was to change their migration
path, toward Huatulco's string of nine bays.
Rather than making battle plans, the speakers made excuses and
demands. One by one, they poured their needs, complaints and wishes
into the microphone. The head of the municipal government's agricultural
commission wanted low-interest loans to promote production of watermelon,
papaya and bananas to feed the tourists. A local fisherman worried
that the Huatulco National Park - the first one in the country to
include both terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems - would mean a fishing
ban in the area. Others wanted a change to the Mexican constitution
allowing foreign investors to own coastal property without having
a Mexican business partner, permission to open casinos, a convention
center that could accommodate 24,000 people, better police protection,
cell phone coverage in the mountains north of Huatulco, more English-speaking
workers. The list grew and grew.
Eventually, the ringing cell phones, loud whispers, scattered
applause and drone from the microphone melted into an undifferentiated
hum around my head. After almost three hours, I crossed the daffodil
carpeting and escaped. As I walked down the Barcelo's curved driveway,
one statement made that afternoon played over and over in my mind:
"We don't want this area to be thought of as the Third World."
But it is the Third World, so to speak.
On August 28, 1996, members of the Revolutionary Popular Army
(EPR) launched coordinated attacks in six Mexican states. The EPR
had appeared just a couple of months earlier in the neighboring
state of Guerrero. This was its first violent action outside that
state. Most of the EPR's targets were military or police outposts.
In Huatulco, however, about 80 guerrilla members armed with assault
rifles entered the FONATUR-built town of La Crucecita. Many of them
headed for the central plaza. A total of nine people - policemen,
military members, guerrillas, and bystanders - died in the attack.
2 La Crucecita was built by the government that this tiny rebel
army said it wanted to overthrow. Perhaps more important, Mexico's
land-hungry tourist industry elbows peasants, the EPR's support
base, off their land and out of the way.
Several months after the August uprising, more than 150 indigenous
peasants in the nearby Loxicha region were arrested for presumed
connections to the EPR. They stayed in jail for nearly four years
- most on flimsy evidence - while their wives, mothers and children
camped out in front of the government offices in the state capital,
demanding their release.3
In the year after the EPR attack on La Crucecita, Mexican non-governmental
organizations documented more 300 incidents of human rights violations
by police and military members against Loxicha residents, including
40 cases of torture.4
Before FONATUR arrived, Santa Cruz Huatulco was a year-round community
of perhaps 500 people. Many more visited the beach seasonally to
fish. Santa Cruz was named for a legendary cross said to have stood
on the beach since beforethe arrival of the Spanish. The name "Huatulco"
comes from an indigenous word meaning "where the people worship
the wood." Francisco Hernandez, who grew up in Santa Cruz, told
me, "The Catholics wanted to know why there was a cross here before
they arrived." They were supposed to the ones bringing Christianity.
As the story goes, the European conquistadors concluded it was the
work of the devil. They tried, but failed, to destroy the massive
cross.
Today, an open-air church sits between the Santa Cruz marina and
the beach. The first night that I met Francisco Hernandez, after
several hours of talking about his work in a cooperative of former
fishermen who operate tour boats, he was anxious for me to see this
church. Its architectural style recalls the southwestern United
States much more than southern Mexico. The pews face the beach and
have a waterfront view on both sides of the spare altar. The large
wooden cross on the altar has a smaller cross at its center, which
is said to be carved from the famous, original cross. When FONATUR
expropriated Santa Cruz for the tourist development, the HuatulqueÀos
demanded that the church be built on this spot, Hernandez explained.
Before coming to Huatulco, I had heard about the violence that
followed FONATUR's arrival. The directors of two different indigenous
rights organizations in Oaxaca had told me that a few Santa Cruz
residents who had refused to leave their homes were killed. One
had lived right next to where the church now stands. "They killed
someone here, didn't they?" I asked Hernandez. "One of the people
who resisted the longest?"
A gust of ocean wind blew through the sanctuary, and for just
a moment I could imagine Santa Cruz Huatulco as a small fishing
village of palm huts, not a marina crowded with tour boats and surrounded
by stucco buildings with stores selling wetsuits, fried fish and
cappuccinos. "Yes, right over here," Hernandez said, as he moved
to the west side of the church. "They killed him right here." Alfredo
Lavariega was shot dead while lying in his hammock, in front of
the hut where he still lived in 1989 - long after most of Santa
Cruz's residents had left. Next to the church, a large palm tree
protrudes from the paving stones. Nearby, two other palm trees bend
above the sand, between wooden umbrellas where sunbathers shade
themselves. "See those palm trees? He planted those."
An expensive seafood restaurant sits just east of the Santa Cruz
Huatulco church. Marina Garcia, a cousin of Francisco Hernandez,
used to live where the restaurant now stands. Her father, Feliciano
Garcia, co-founded the town of Santa Cruz in the late 1950s. Before
then, it was a seasonal community. People came to the coast to fish,
but lived most of the year in the hills north of the beach, working
as farmers. Many indigenous groups, including the Zapotecs, Chatinos,
Mixtecs, Aztecs and Chontals, came at various times to harvest the
fruits of the sea. When Alfredo Lavariega was killed, five years
after the expropriation, most Santa Cruz residents had already moved
from their palm-and-sheet-metal huts on the beach to cinderblock
houses in La Crucecita.
Marina and Feliciano Garcia were among them. Before 1984, Marina
Garcia had worked in the Santa Cruz general store. The store sold
food and household supplies at a reduced price, part of a government
program to meet basic needs in poor, rural communities. Today, Garcia
still works in a store. At a market stall in La Crucecita, she sells
crafts from all over the state of Oaxaca to visitors from all over
the world. La Crucecita, which means "the little cross," was built
from the ground up in the late 1980s to service the tourist resorts
and house many of the displaced HuatulqueÀos. Today, it is the largest
population center in the development. FONATUR had intended the waterfront
community of Santa Cruz Huatulco to be larger. So far, though, there
are more tourist workers and HuatulqueÀos than there are well-heeled
newcomers who can afford the real estate prices in the new Santa
Cruz.
In many ways, La Crucecita looks like any other colonial-style
Mexican town. The central plaza has benches, well-groomed trees
and paths leading to the central kiosk. A large church overlooks
the plaza. The streets are narrow and built on a grid. The homes
are close together, with doors opening right onto the street. I
wandered around the town for several hours before I put my finger
on exactly what is wrong with La Crucecita. A few things struck
me as odd. Unlike most smallish Mexican towns, many of the stores
sell things that no one really needs: swimming pool equipment, hundred-dollar
coolers, expensive fishing rods. Barbed wire fences, generally seen
only near livestock or soldiers, surround several city lots. The
streets are named after trees, like in the United States, rather
than for important historic figures and dates, as in the rest of
Mexico. Still, it was not any of those things that made me feel
as if I were far from Mexico. Finally, it occurred to me: La Crucecita
is so strange because it is finished. There are no stacks of cement
blocks waiting to become houses, no forests of rebar jutting from
the tops of buildings, waiting to become a new floor.
Since 1987, Feliciano Garcia and his wife have lived in La Crucecita,
as have his ten grown children and their families. Most of the time,
he lives on the front porch of his tiny cement house. He says the
hot, stuffy air inside makes him sick, so he stays outside, where
he has a small bed, a table and a radio. People passing by sometimes
stop and stare. Nearly blind from cataracts, Feliciano Garcia usually
does not notice them. He remembers what Huatulco was like before
any of this was here: before the cement houses and prying eyes,
before the highway, even before the village of Santa Cruz Huatulco.
In 1959, Garcia's family was one of 20 that built houses in Santa
Cruz Huatulco. "Before that, no one lived in the lowlands. Everyone
lived in the mountains," he says. Garcia co-founded a fishing cooperative
in Santa Cruz. The seafood was abundant: clams, oysters, lobster,
turtle and shark. "We went to Puerto Angel by boat to sell our products.
Then we got the money to go to Pochutla to buy what we needed. We
went by water. We didn't go by land because we couldn't. We couldn't
get across the large rivers and gullies. That's how it was. Then
the highway was built and the cars came in." A couple of years after
the highway was completed, FONATUR came in, too. Garcia was a farmer
as well as a fisherman, cultivating sesame, hibiscus, peanuts and
corn on nearly 50 acres of land just a few miles from the beach.
It was good quality land and a beautiful location. So much so, FONATUR
decided to build its offices there.
Garcia and the other residents of Santa Cruz learned they were
losing their land when the governor of Oaxaca visited on May 30,
1984. "Some people said that the governor was coming to expropriate,
but we didn't believe them, no. But then, they came. It doesn't
matter. Everything comes to an end." He shrugged his shoulders and
abruptly changed the subject.
* * *
A sturdy adobe and wood house sits at the far northeastern corner
of the 51,380 acres of land FONATUR expropriated in 1984. The day
before the meeting at the Barcelo resort, Francisco Hernandez stopped
by this house for a soda and a chat. Approaching the woman who sat
on the front porch, he introduced himself by asking who her people
were, and telling her about his people. She introduced herself simply
as Carmela, after nodding in recognition at some of the names he
mentioned. He asked her about the recent government announcement
that she and her neighbors must leave their land.
It has been more than 16 years since the expropriation, but because
of the sluggishness of the resort development FONATUR has not bothered
to evict everyone. Carmela told Hernandez that she did not want
to leave her home, though she seemed somewhat resigned to it. Later
in the conversation she said, "I have my chickens, my sheep, my
pigs. I am planting papaya trees." This act, planting fruit trees
after being told she must leave, was the first hint of concrete
resistance that she offered.
Hernandez stepped quickly into the space she opened with her revelation.
She did not have to settle for whatever FONATUR's first offer of
indemnization was, he told her. He explained what his community,
Santa Cruz, had gone through in their struggle with FONATUR. The
indemnization of the Huatulquenos was not intended to reflect the
value of the land they lost, but only the improvements they had
made to it: houses, fences, cultivation for crops.5 By refusing
to settle for pittances, many families received much more than FONATUR's
first offer.
Carmela's house is within sight of the Copalita River, the primary
water source for the entire Bays of Huatulco development. Perhaps
that is why it has become so urgent to FONATUR to settle the land
conflict with the HuatulqueÀos who still live around the river.
FONATUR is turning the coast and the dryland forest that borders
it into an oasis of blue swimming pools, green golf courses and
freshly scrubbed walkways.
The average annual rainfall for Huatulco is about 38 inches, but
nearly all of it falls in July, August and September. Some investigators
have sounded an alarm: FONATUR did not seriously consider long-term
water use in its master plan for the Bays of Huatulco. Right now,
the water flowing through the Copalita River is more than adequate,
but the end of that cheap, easy supply might be within sight.
A complex combination of development, deforestation, and waste
- along with FONATUR's effort to create year-round green in a region
with a long dry season - might mean impending crisis. Crops prices
have dropped for the peasants who live in and around the dryland
forests north of the coast. In desperation, many have abandoned
the traditional soil conservation techniques they used in favor
of slash-and-burn agriculture. That shift, combined with illegal
timber cutting (primarily for construction in the tourism development)
reduced forest cover in the region from about 95 percent in the
1950s to less than 50 percent today.6
"Devastation of the forests has been followed by soil erosion;
as a result, the water supply to the Bays of Huatulco tourist development
area will be exhausted by the year 2020, unless some regeneration
program is implemented," assert forest engineer Carlos Pailles and
economist David Barkin in one of many articles they have written
on the subject.7
I asked Enrique LaClette, who runs both a dive shop and the local
environmental organization, about potential water shortages. He
looked at me quizzically. "Water is something that we can assume,"
he said. Even the Director of the Huatulco National Park, David
Ortega, could only tell me, "I have heard of some studies showing
there are potential problems" with water shortages. Ortega suggested
that if the Copalita River is inadequate, they could perhaps draw
water from the Coyula River, at the opposite end of the expropriated
area. He indicated this may or may not be possible for FONATUR,
because "it is not clear what is happening to the community members
there."
About 2,000 people live in Bajos de Coyula, in the Coyula River
basin. Bajos, or "low place," refers to the fact that the Coyula
River meets the Pacific Ocean at a deep-sea beach. Walking along
the Coyula beach, I could feel the fury with which the waves crashed
into the land, sending tremors through the hard-packed sand. Because
of this, FONATUR does not plan to fill this beach with four-star
hotels, sunbathers and scuba divers.
There is some small-scale tourism in Coyula. During the dry season,
taxis with talented drivers can manage the trip over the hilly dirt
road that connects Bajos de Coyula to the coastal highway. Mexican
families come for Christmas and Easter vacations. Local residents
sell them baked fish, fresh coconuts and beer. During those weeks,
perhaps 50 or 60 vacationers sleep in hammocks hung inside open-air
shelters on the beach. The post-and-palm-roof structures are built
new every year, because it is easier than trying to construct something
that can withstand the rainy season's storms. When it is American
season in the hotels of Santa Cruz and Tangolunda, it is still Mexican
season in Bajos de Coyula. Foreigners do not visit this beach. FONATUR
representatives do not go to Coyula either. The local residents
have marked a line across the road at the entrance to their community,
a line they have asked FONATUR not to cross.
Nearly every inch of land at Bajos de Coyula is green with life
well into the dry season. Palms heavy with coconuts arch overhead.
Deep green stalks of corn grow tall. Papaya trees produce massive
fruit. FONATUR recognizes the richness of the soil, the best in
the entire municipality. In its master plan, it set aside much of
the area's fluvial soils for intensive agriculture to serve the
tourist resorts.8
A 1985 FONATUR planning map shows a small urbanized area in the
center of Bajos de Coyula. FONATUR officials intended to move the
residents from the huts and houses scattered across thousands of
acres of forest and farmland into cinderblock houses, like those
that fill La Crucecita. This urban area has not yet been built.
FONATUR might have waited too long. The May 1984 presidential decree
mandating the Huatulco expropriation acknowledged that Mexican law
(Article 125 of the Agrarian Reform Federal Law) places a time limit
on FONATUR's right to the land: "[W]hen five years have passed since
this expropriation, if the reason for the expropriation has not
been achieved, the National Fund to Promote Ejidos [collective farms]
can demand the reversion of the land...."9
That five-year limit has been exceeded more than three times over.
Many of Coyula's residents are asking: If FONATUR could allow so
many years to pass without taking even the first step toward development,
how badly could it need the land, anyway? As the people who live
there and work the land, they believe they need it more.
The day that I visited Laurentino Cormona, a farmer and community
leader in Bajos de Coyula, he thought for a long time about where
we could go to talk. We wandered around Coyula's small downtown
area, which has a general store, a few cantinas, a small restaurant,
and the houses of the most prosperous residents. As we walked, several
buzzards circled overhead. About 160 of the 446 communal landholders
in Coyula are members of the non-profit organization Cormona founded
to fight the expropriation. Most of the other residents are quietly
supportive. Still, there are unfriendly figures in town. Just as
my patience began to wear down, Cormona decided on an open-air bar
that was closed at mid-day. We pulled a couple of plastic chairs
in front of a wobbly wooden table, next to a gleaming jukebox that
was locked behind a metal gate. Cormona began his story by telling
me about his neighbors' new houses. FONATUR insisted the people
of Coyula stop building, because they no longer own the land. Coyula's
residents keep building.
The article that appeared in the Oaxaca newspaper on May 30, 1984
quoted the state's governor as saying, "This great project becomes
a reality for the people of Oaxaca today, with concrete actions
to strengthen their future."10 Cormona was happy with the future
that he had before the expropriation. He refused the small indemnization
he was offered by FONATUR for his house and five acres of farmland.
He felt that to accept the money was to accept the expropriation,
so he said no.
For years, Cormona led the fight of Coyula's residents against
FONATUR. They refused to leave, instead complaining to the municipal
government, the federal Department of Agrarian Reform, and anyone
else who would listen to them. They struggled mostly on their own
against FONATUR, demanding that they regain legal title to the 8,000
acres they had owned communally. In 1995, they sought the help of
the National Union of Agricultural Workers (UNTA) in Mexico City.
Cormona says they did this "because we don't have a single lawyer
or licenciado here," using the term Mexicans use to refer to anyone
with a university degree.
In 1999, UNTA finally persuaded the Department of Agrarian Reform
to come to Bajos de Coyula and complete a census, recording the
community's resources "down to the sheep, trees, chickens and turkeys,"
Cormona said. The census was needed because FONATUR and the community
disagreed over how many people lived in Bajos de Coyula and what
they had owned in 1984. When I spoke with Jorge Ayanegui of FONATUR,
he did not mention Coyula when he listed the communities still in
conflict. I told Cormona this, and he said simply, "He has already
forgotten about us." I didn't realize he was joking until a small
smile passed across his face. Cormona has spent a good portion of
the last 16 years making sure that FONATUR does not forget about
Bajos de Coyula.
I asked Cormona what he saw for the future. "With God's help,
we will succeed," he told me. "We have faith that, in the end, we
will get out of this expropriation." He believes that 2001, year
17 of the battle with FONATUR, will be the last one. "So far, things
are going well," he told me calmly, as if he were talking about
a situation that had lasted just a few weeks or months. "We keep
living here, we keep sowing our fields and building houses."
Meanwhile, fellow HuatulqueÀo Francisco Hernandez has been learning
how to live - even thrive - in the new Huatulco. "The tourist development
is really nice, but you have to know how to negotiate really well
with the government functionaries," Hernandez says. "Huatulco is
a very lovely place, both as a tourist area, and also for the people
who are from here." In the end, he believes, "Everyone should benefit
from Huatulco."
Enrique LaClette insists that the time has come for the Bays of
Huatulco. The big hotel companies "don't care about Huatulco yet,"
but he thinks that will change. Even if it doesn't, he is happy
to stay in the placed that he adopted as his home 12 years ago.
"This is not a place that you are going to get rich, but the quality
of life is beautiful." Still, he thinks that the conflicts between
the HuatulqueÀos and the newcomers will outlive him. He believes
that his children or grandchildren might see the end of it.
LaClette wants Huatulco to grow, and yet he fears it. "There will
be more people, more concrete, more boats, more everything." Nonetheless,
he believes that economic needs sometimes must take precedence over
ecological ones. "It is very, very hard. Sometimes you just have
to hold your stomach and realize that it is better to protect people
than nature." He explained how he feels about these decisions by
telling me about a poem by Nezahuacoyotl, an Aztec emperor. It is
printed so tiny on Mexico's 100-peso bill that I needed bright sunlight,
a good magnifying glass and patience to discern it:
Amo el canto del zenzontle
Pajaro de 400 voces
Amo el color del jade
Y el enervante perfume de las flores
Pero amo mas a mi hermano el hombre
I love the singing of the mockingbird,
Bird of four hundred voices.
I love the color of jade
And the overwhelming perfume of the flowers.
But I love my brother, the human, more.
REFERENCES
1 Milenio, February 22, 2001, p. 37.
2 Tom Penick, "EPR Carries out Bloody Attacks on Huatulco and 6
Other Towns," September 8, 1997, www.tomzap.com/epr1.html, and "Ataca
el EPR en seis estados," La Jornada, August 29, 1996.
3 "En Oaxaca, caceria de 'eperristas,'" La Jornada, December 26,
1996. Shortly after President Vicente Fox took office in December
2000, Oaxaca governor Jose Murat announced he would release the
men from prison. As of this writing many have been released, but
some remain in jail.
4 "En la agenda de relator de la ONU, 40 casos de tortura en los
Loxichas," La Jornada, August 6, 1997.
5 FONATUR Huatulco, "Memorandum que se presenta a la consideracion
del C. Lic. Carlos Salinas de Gortari, Secretario de Programacion
y Presupuesto," no date.
6 David Barkin and Carlos Pailles, "NGO-Community Collaboration
for Ecotourism: A Strategy for Sustainable Regional Development
in Oaxaca," April 1999, http://www.planeta.com/planeta/99/0499huatulco.html
7 David Barkin and Carlos Pailles, "Water as an instrument for sustainable
regional development," Arid Lands Newsletter, Arid Lands Information
Center, University of Arizona, No. 44, Fall/Winter 1998.
8 Beatrice Trueblood, ed, Los 25 AÀos del Fondo Nacional de Fomento
al Turismo, 1999, p. 146.
9 Diario Oficial, May 29, 1984, p. 11.
10 Noticias, May 30, 1984, p. 1.
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